


One Way Or Another

by aMassiveDisappointment (BadOldWest)



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1980s, Alternate Universe - High School, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-11 08:09:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11710350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/aMassiveDisappointment
Summary: Jyn’s life is entrenched in boys, Bodhi’s rigid sports and extracurricular schedules, and a social life she was swept up in. As a loner, sometimes the only people she talks to outside of school were these boys, Bodhi’s friends. Boys she can not date.And when Cassian is there, said best friend, her life is centered around being in the thick of these boys, because he is one of them.Who she can not date.1980's High School AU, as first tested on my tumblr prompts story.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> We all knew this was coming. Part 2 is in the works, with a preview for those who want it on my tumblr if you just search "1980's AU"

She can’t date her brother’s best friend. There are rules.

And as far as brothers go, she can not complain for a second about ending up as Bodhi’s sister. Even if his soccer friends are, frankly, fine as hell, but she doesn’t get to date them because of the rules.

Bodhi is too sweet to think of these things, phoning her from practice that they were all grabbing dinner if she wants to come, calling her downstairs when sweaty boys filled their kitchen, their quiet scientist parents blinking as they watch food vanish from the fridge. The Ersos, who lived and loved in laboratories, are equally baffled by sociable, athletic son and eyeliner-bedecked, punk daughter. Jyn’s life is entrenched in  _boys,_ Bodhi’s rigid sports and extracurricular schedule, and a social life she was swept up in. As a loner, sometimes the only people she talks to outside of school were these  _boys,_  Bodhi’s friends. Boys she  _can not date._

And when Cassian is there,  _said best friend,_  her life is centered around being in the thick of these  _boys,_  because he is one of them.

_**Who she can not date.** _

And when the pizza Lyra Erso brought home had been long gone by the time she psyches herself up enough to go claim some, and she’ll flip out at the mountain of  _boys_  strewn across the downstairs of her house. Sweaty from practise, antsy from the un-invasive but constant presence of adult supervision; as Galen Erso will usually decide to trim hedges or mow the lawn at 8pm just to assume a casual approach to his hovering.

She’ll keep yelling, flipping open empty pizza boxes for dramatic effect. Bodhi will smile apologetically, yelling at his friends playfully for not saving anything for his sister.

“Nothing in this life is guaranteed,” drawls Kay, the goalie. He has an eerie magnetism to any soccer ball flying towards his face. Other than that, intolerable.

Cassian will then hand her a slice that he’d somehow hidden by shutting in the Erso’s microwave. And Jyn will stare up at him, and his kind-of-stupid, kind-of-beautiful man bun, chewing on a perfectly soggy slice of buffalo chicken pizza (her favorite, and just how she liked it, in that order) she knows she is in trouble, because there are rules about who you can date, and your brother’s friends are not one of them.

Sometimes, she won’t go down, she’ll stay in her room, listening to The Cure in her room and generally sulking. She leaves the door open, listening to the rowdiness unfold, laughing to herself.

Cassian passes to use the bathroom, silent and mysterious. He hovers in her doorway, comments on the music she plays. They have similar taste, which she finds funny, because her parents are overwhelmed with fear by the angst broadcast that echoed out of her room.

“You know there were discovered at The Jet,” he informs her, materializing out of the dark of the hallway and gesturing to the music filling her room. She grins, taps her pen on her notebook.

“Never been. Can’t imagine anything local to here taking off.”

“They’ve got great bands,” he leans in her doorway, “we should go some time.”

Alarms sound in her head. Blaring.

_Brother’s best friend. Brother’s best friend._

She smiles weakly, “Yeah, the guys would love it.”

Cassian’s smile falls, and he withdraws a little. She wonders what she said wrong.

“Sounds good,” he tells her, “Night, Jyn.”

The music playing after he leaves just sounds like noise, sludge in her ears, unintelligible.

One unnaturally warm April evening, he slips into the warm light of her room, hands her a mixtape. Her skin is sticky with sweat, and she wants to press it to all of his. He smiles at her, says nothing, and vanishes.

She stares down at the cassette long after he leaves; a hunk of plastic that contains so many hidden meanings inside.

 _He’s your brother’s best friend,_  she tells herself, slipping it into her cassette player, pulling the headphones on to drown in the voices he chose for her.  _He’s just being nice._

There are cliches; and there was how her high school treated Big Games. Cliches atop Cliches. Weeping cheerleaders, the whole town coming together to watch able-bodied boys injure each other, a ball and a metal rectangle that the ball must breech, or something. Jyn goes for Bodhi, as she does everything involving…. _involvement._  Except hanging out with the boys. Because…

She denies it is for Cassian, it is for herself. To socialize. To make her parents stop worrying for five minutes.

There are tears at these games. Literal tears, which she can not understand. Like soldiers coming home from war tears. 

Until she sees Bodhi get The Goal of the season, minutes left in the game, followed by Luke with only a two-meter miss by the goalie, and watches them hug each other, Cassian diving in and hoisting her brother up like a trophy, and the joy on that damn perfect brother’s face.

She understands.

She doesn’t cry, but she cheers.

Luke Skywalker approaches, clapping Bodhi supportively on the back, and after exchanging a smile, seems to notice Jyn lurking around. She hovers, anxious, not wanting to be stuck talking to people who don’t even like her. He looks nervous by her presence, which she is mildly offended by.

“I left my cleats in the locker room, can you run and grab them?” Bodhi pleads with his big brown eyes, and Jyn sticks her tongue out at him and jogs off. They begin to speak intently as she’s out of earshot. Bless him for sparing her this conversation.

She wonders faintly what they were talking about before slamming her way through the back door of the gymnasium. Everyone is in their cars, having broke to determine what the evening’s plans are. She knows what she has lined up; Blondie and trying not to sulk over prom coming up. Surprise; all the boys she knows are her brother’s friends, who she can not date. 

Bodhi’s cleats are in the locker room, and she rolls her eyes and picks them up. She turns to leave and almost smacks face-first into Cassian, who as far as she knew was just in his car. Outside. Who clearly hasn’t forgotten anything. If he is there for anything in that locker room, it was her.  

“Congratulations on the big game,” she says, feeling like a heart-fluttering tween from a John Hughes movie.

“Did you like the mix?”

She closes her eyes. nods. “I listen to it before I go to sleep.”

“I made the same one for myself,” his thumb finds her cheek. “I listen to it to fall asleep too, if you don’t mind.”

“Why would I mind?”

“I know you’re a private person.”

She shakes her head. “I like that you’re listening too.”

Cassian’s hands slip around her waist, eyes intent on hers. She lets him into her space, her palms sweating, trying to wipe them off on her jean jacket before they land on the back of his neck. He’s kissing her before she realizes, because it just so  _right_  for this to happen. Like the right crescendo of a song. A power ballad, a Whitney Houston wail.

When Cassian’s hands slip under her t-shirt, she faintly realizes this probably wasn’t what her brother had in mind, but at that point, it was far too late.

Fuck the rules.

She always saw herself as a rebel.


	2. Chapter 2

Jyn was in shock that the mix Cassian had made her didn’t disintegrate from listening too many times. 

  
She’d played it almost every night since he gave it to her, twice a night since they kissed in the locker room. 

  
She listened so often that the rise and fall of all the songs started to feel like a physical experience in the order they carried her: to start, to make her body relaxed but awake, “One Way or Another” with Debbie Harry’s seductive growling, “Running Up That Hill” and the dirty fun that was “I Want Candy” and “Kings of the Wild Frontier”… there was something so wildly fun about it. And “Lovecats” at the end… 

  
_“I love you, let’s go…”_

 _  
_ I mean, if you were into that thing she’d snark to herself, trying to fall asleep with the very difficult task of calming her heart.

  
She had liked that it wasn’t moody, because she’d had people instantly assume by the eyeliner she only listened to the most aggressive of punk music, but she just liked that it was edgy without being negative…encouraging, even. Positive, she wanted to say. Feminine, but not girly. Her weird, personal blend of contradictions. 

  
So she stretched herself out on her bed to listen again, on a balmy Friday night, the boys all whooping downstairs. It was too hard to go down every time and pretend Cassian was _just a boy_ still. She had to deal with her well meaning parents needling about prom and her plans to apply for college next year, and everyone wanted Cassian to ask them _-everyone-_. 

  
Including her, but…these things were complicated. She had insisted they keep it a secret from Bodhi, after all, which meant keeping it a secret from everyone. He’d seemed surprised by the suggestion, but didn’t press her; happy enough to steal kisses up against the trophy case in the empty hall when she walked him to practice, or squeeze her hand under the table when she sat next to him. 

  
Along the beginning of “One Way Or Another”, the sexy threats bordering on serious terror, but all with Blondie’s charm, her door cracked open. Cassian’s fist was pressed against it, to imply he had knocked, which she didn’t hear. She rolled on her stomach, freeing an ear from the headphones. 

  
“Hey.”

  
He smiled, his eyes calm. “Hey. Do you want me to leave you alone, or…?”

  
She shook her head, sitting up. “I’m just listening to your mix-” she smiled up at him, but he crept forward, pressing her gently onto her back. 

  
“Leave them on,” he instructed, nothing the headphones in her ears, pressing play with a slight smile. She obeyed, drowning back into the pounding bridge of the song. All sound but the music escaped her instantly. His lips touched hers, tentative, until she realized she was kissing him to the rhythm of the mix he gave her, making her hear it and feel him at the same time. She had to brace herself; Kings of the Wild Frontier was next. And there was a boy in her bed. On top of her. Kissing her. Running his thumbs up and down her ribcage as he held her arching body close. 

  
What an opportunity this was, for both of them. To touch like they’d wanted to touch when he was making this tape for her.   
After she managed to embody all the wild, carefree sexual energy of that song into a three minute and fifty six second make-out with her not-boyfriend, she had to push him away. She had made that time count, after all. 

  
“They’ll start to wonder where you are.”

  
He brushed her bangs out of her eyes, nodding. She felt so flushed and sweaty. The length of him felt so good pressed against the length of her. To have something to press this humming, angsty body, to give like the women who sang her favorite songs had so much to give; men unable to take it all be damned.

  
“We’ll get to the whole tape someday,” he promised, with a tentative smile like he hoped she’d agree. She nodded dumbly. 

  
He was gone before she knew it. Like he had never even been there. 

Jyn flopped hopelessly back onto her mattress.  _ Fuck. _

 

Jyn hardly classified her teenage experience as normal. 

She had the confrontational angst that was pretty common in girls her age, but she hadn’t really found herself enough yet to channel it somewhere focused- even into stupid things like boys or cheerleading or even being a respectable geek. 

She felt it though, the restlessness, that it was all supposed to be starting and she had not started yet. 

It was the slight electric buzz she heard in the silence when the house was too quiet at night, or walking the neighborhood from end to end on a Saturday night, or an afternoon that had plenty she should have been doing but nothing she wanted to be.

Jyn was anxious, her nails bitten down with chipped polish, her hair never quite the way it was meant to look, her eyeliner gumming in an arc in the crease of her lid by the end of the day. 

It was Cassian’s thigh wedged between her legs, and the motions her body made against it, and the want that it inspired. 

But there was also fear and trepidation and him tensing up the second after she did to pull away and ask if she was okay. 

She was the aspiration of all of these things, but she was still unable to smooth the seams out to be the adult she wanted to be. 

“One of the guys could take you to prom,” Bodhi said, mouth full, with a self-assured smile. 

Her helpful, sociable brother, who had a friend for everything. 

Including a pity date for his sister. 

A few of the teammates around the table grunted in assertion, but stared at their plates as if to say, “yeah,  _ one _ of us could.”

Continuing on, Bodhi glanced around the table. God, he meant well, but this was torture as everyone avoided her eyes. 

Cassian returned from the kitchen, tray of brownies in hand. 

“Cassian, you haven’t asked anyone to prom, right?”

He looked a little surprised, “Not yet.”

She dug a fork in a broccoli stalk. Lyra had insisted on a vegetable being served alongside the pizza for once. “I’m not that desperate that my brother needs to set me up with one of his friends.”

Kay glanced up from the broccoli he was sawing the florets off of. He claimed to not like stalks. “So you’re not going?”

_ Ouch.  _

Jyn punched his arm, hard, and Cassian took the seat between them to play peacemaker. Bodhi seemed to wilt a little, staring pointedly at Luke. Luke cleared his throat. 

“Jyn, if you want to go, I could take you.”

Jyn tried to smile.

“Luke, don’t let Bodhi force you to do anything. Go with whoever you want to.”

“I already can’t take them,” he blurted out, semi-thoughtlessly, and Jyn felt Bodhi heat beside her. He was very sweet-natured, and even though Luke’s immediate  _ “oh I can’t have that option anyway” _ attempt to appease her clearly offended Bodhi more deeply than it did her.  

Next to her, Cassian was staring at her plate.

“Jyn…”

“You need something? I’m heading to the kitchen anyway. I’m finished.”

Jyn rose from her seat tossed her napkin on her plate. 

Cassian shook his head, and she went to the kitchen by herself. 

She knew Bodhi meant well, but she didn’t want Cassian to ask her because her brother made her look like such a loser she needed him to pawn her off.

And now, because she had been sharp, he probably wouldn’t ask at all. 

She shut herself in her room, spun on her heel, falling against the closed door, and wedged her face in the crooks of her elbows, screaming. 

There was a knock on the door, soft. 

“Yeah?”

“Jyn?”

She dug the heels of her hands in her eyes. “Hey. Sorry about that.”

“Are you okay?”

She pressed her ear to the door. It felt unusually warm, was that because he was leaning on the other side?

She didn’t feel like opening the door, but she hoped he’d stay. He did. 

“I’m alright. Just… don’t like people talking about me like I need to be fixed. I’m not trying to be a problem. I’m just trying to be myself.”

_ Whatever that meant.  _

“I like that about you.” She heard him laugh from the other side of the door to himself. “Listen. There’s a band playing at The Jet this weekend that I want you to hear. Do you want to go?”

She chewed her lower lip. To be fair, if he had come up here to ask her to prom, literally nothing about that night would go smoothly. It wasn’t his fault, her brother’s conniving had pretty much destroyed being able to respect anyone who would ever want to go to prom with her. 

“That sounds nice.”

She laughed, relieved, but also little like a sob.

_ Prom is fucking stupid anyway. This’ll be more fun. _

“Are you okay? I’m sorry about-”

“It’s okay. Not your fault. Just my crazy family.”

“Do you want to take a drive? Clear your head?”

She let her head lull to the side against the door. She had so little of a social life her parents hadn’t even forbid her from doing anything, so she technically would not be breaking any rules. 

“Will there be good music? No crap.”

He laughed. “You can be the DJ.”

Her hands balled into fists, and she even rose on her toes a little, thinking of him smiling on the other side of the door.

“Say you’re going home. Start the car. I’ll be down in ten.”

 

She probably could have told someone she was just going for a walk, but where was the fun in that?

Kicking out her window screen and climbing down from the porch roof sounded a lot more her style. 

Cassian was waiting in his car, INXS filling the car in a casual, ambient way, but he had opened the glove compartment for her to browse his selections when she took her place beside him. Getting in a car never felt so fun, so intimate, diving into his space. 

She pulled a mix out her her pocket instead. 

“If you don’t mind,” she said, and he leaned over the console towards her to kiss her. His hands were on her neck, gently, and she liked the guide of him to her lips. She prayed no one could see it, because it was probably her favorite kiss she’d ever gotten and she wanted it to stay in this car forever. 

There was some teeth involved, mostly clumsy and unintentional, because he was smiling

“Of course I don’t fucking mind. The floor is yours.”

He pulled out of her driveway, and she slid the tape in. 

There was a racing little opening riff and then Jyn leaned back in her seat, cheeks flaming. This was so intimate, she had no idea how he found the courage to just pull a mixtape together for her. 

And yes, she would never exclude Debbie Harry from this moment, so “Call Me” was her first selection, probably the mostly teasingly horny song she could think of. When Blondie told you to call her, it was because you were _already thinking_ of calling her. And she knew it.

Cassian grinned at her, driving like he seemed to know where they were headed. 

“Where are we going?” she finally remembered to ask. It looked like he was headed to the freeway, and she couldn’t imagine where that would lead. 

Maybe she’d never have to go back, and that prospect vaguely excited her. 

“Highway first. For speed.”

She laughed, chewing on the charm of the necklace she always wore like she did when she was nervous. Once he merged into a comfortable speeding lane, She laughed as he floored it, once, teasingly, smirking to himself when she fell back against the seat when he slowed down. There was something about having a boy drive you, like he was carrying you in the cradle of himself. 

“Modern Love” kicked into high gear, and she risked rolling down her window, and there was that little white-noise roar that added to the whole Bowie Ambiance. Cassian followed suit with his own window, grinning at her. 

She liked that they didn’t need to talk much. That they just circled to the edges of the space they shared and looped back around to brush against each other, as if to remind each other that they weren’t alone. 

Cassian, in the ultimate act of chivalry, got off the exit a procured a drive-through milkshake for her, which she primly shared with him, passing it back and forth as he drove home through some of the back roads. 

He broke out in an appreciative laugh when “Born to Run” came on, and she realized how long it had been since they had spoken. 

“It’s my dad’s favorite,” she excused, and he shook his head.

“It’s a classic.”

Jyn tilted her face into the breeze, letting it toss her hair, letting the music just sort of be, and letting Cassian warm the space beside her. 

It would suck if Cassian asked her to prom. It was too fresh from Bodhi throwing her under the bus, it would feel like he was obligated to. 

But she had kind of...already...said no...so what was the harm in withdrawing the rejection.

“Do you want to do something lame and go to prom together?”

She raised her eyebrows at him, and he laughed, which made her realize her elbows, upper body, and head were wedged out the window because she apparently was  _ very nervous. _

She pulled herself back into the car.

“I’ll rent a tux,” he leaned his head back appreciatively, ruffling his long hair with an absent hand.

“My parents will take a million pictures.”

“Chaperones will be all over us.”

“Music will suck.”

“Memories we won’t actually remember.”

“Super lame.”

He smirked at her, winding the car back to a familiar neighborhood. “It would be. I’d like that.”

It occurred to her, terrified her, that Cassian was very good at being exactly what she needed in the moment. 

His hand rested on her knee. She’d never had that before, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you think you’d like until it’s pleasantly, surprisingly, already happening.

“So when did this happen?” she grinned at him. “Wanting to get to know me more?”

He looked confused. “I always did.”

She rolled her eyes. “I was always there. You never said anything.”

He glanced cautiously at her, then back at the road. 

“I think it takes a brave man to want to figure you out, Jyn Erso, and I didn’t want to start something I couldn’t finish.”

She propped her feet up on the dash and took a quiet breath. 

“Pull over.”

He lost his “mysterious” vibe over how nervously he looked back at her. 

“Okay?”

She smirked when he parked in the lot of a playground, but it was dark, so they had a little time before anyone caught them. She was on him in a minute, and his seat was falling back, his hands groping to slide the whole apparatus back so she wouldn’t be wedged against the horn. 

Making out in a car seemed like a pretty teenage activity, and one she was willing to allow herself the immature indulgence of.    


Her mixtape didn't fail her.


End file.
